I'm not sure what your nitpick is supposed to be getting at. Good businesses create a solution to your problem and then "insert themselves" between you and that solution. That's how they make money. If they could not stand in the middle and charge you for access, there would be no incentive to create the solution.

I don't think I was nitpicking at all. "inserting themselves between" two things is very, very different than providing a solution to a problem.

> Good businesses create a solution to your problem and then "insert themselves" between you and that solution.

I cannot wrap my head around this framing at all. Businesses that provide a solution aren't inserting themselves between anything. They're offering a solution directly.

Think about any software company with a large sales team. The people writing the software are not the people selling the software. Writing software and offering it to people does not sustain a business. Creating IP and then finding creative ways to charge people for it does. The sales team that "inserts themselves between" your problem and the solution the product team has created is a core part of the business, a sine qua non.

> The sales team that "inserts themselves between" your problem and the solution

That's just an incredibly jaded way to look at things. The solution is developed by people who specialize in developing solutions. The communication of the existence of the solution to people who need it is handled by people who specialize in communication and customer outreach, i.e. sales.

You may think that without a sales team the solution would be cheaper; the reality is that without a sales team the solution would either not exist or be substantially less refined as _someone_ has to handle the customer interactions, and if that's the dev than that's taking them away from working on the product.

I don't think it's jaded at all. I don't disagree that a sales team is necessary, either. I'm just describing how a business works: it creates a solution and then finds a way to extract value by selling the solution to those for whom value would be created. Creating something and extracting value from it require different skillsets; that's all fine and good.

We view a business as problematic when it's only inserting itself between you and the solution, without actually creating the solution, i.e. rent-seeking. So, it's the relationship between the business and the solution that causes an issue, not the action of putting the business between the solution and the problem. The latter is a given, always.

> We view a business as problematic when it's only inserting itself between you and the solution

None of that opinion was conveyed in what you wrote earlier.

The sales team and the dev team are both a part of the same team.